I'm going to reboot Linux for the first time since May and boot up Windows...

... all because of iTunes 7 and CoverFlow.  If you haven't seen it, check it out!  http://www.apple.com/itunes/jukebox/coverflow.html

Amarok needs to be able to browse albums using cover art like this.  That's something I never did understand about Amarok - the dev's all insist that you never need a playlist over 50 songs... but what if you want to browse your collection?  Then you're stuck with a crummy text-only list of the artists, which you have to click to expand, etc.  We really need a better collection browser that could *gasp* utilize the playlist area?

Any possibility of this happening?

More screenshots?

stokedfish wrote:http://home.cogeco.ca/~scooper215/Picture%201.png[/img]
[img]http://home.cogeco.ca/~scooper215/Picture%202.png[/img]
[img]http://home.cogeco.ca/~scooper215/Picture%203.png[/img]msg15079#msg15079 date=1158104786]
More screenshots?

http://home.cogeco.ca/~scooper215/Picture%201.png
http://home.cogeco.ca/~scooper215/Picture%202.png
http://home.cogeco.ca/~scooper215/Picture%203.png

iTunes 7 also supports multiple libraries... something that I've seen requested here as well.

http://www.tomklaver.net/multiple-itunes-libraries-in-itunes-7

Oooooh...Pretty!   I like coverflow and I'd love to see something like it in amarok.  That said, I'll stick with amarok, it STILL does a lot more than iTunes (lyrics, musicbrainz, etc.), it does it better (IMHO) and it actually runs on Linux 

True, Amarok has a lot on iTunes, especially in terms of music management.  But I think iTunes has the eye candy now...

I've never really found a use for the Amarok-MB functionality - I'd prefer to use Picard and tag my music before I bring it into Amarok.

True, the tagging in amarok is not great.  I have issues writing .m4a tags.  I didn't have much luck with Picard...I had to run a CD full of songs through MusicIPMixer first to generate the PUIDs.  At that point, it was just as easy to finish them off in EasyTag (album names can be somewhat elusive with mixed songs)

Amarok does nearly everything I need (the itunes 7 stuff is nice, but useless). however, I think Amarok needs Database-Driven playlists, and not this xml-mess. And no, It's not braindead to have playlists with 100 songs or more.
The AFT-Feature would start making sense with DB-playlists. The performance-issuses (still present, although accepable) would be history.
today, therer are two kinds of players out there: db-driven and playlist-driven. The latter are about to become extinct. Amarok is neither the one nor the other.
And the devs already implemented 100+ playlists by default: The smart ones. Or is it also braindead to have more than 100 songs in your collection?
I think, the devs should rethink their concept.

chodo wrote: however, I think Amarok needs Database-Driven playlists, and not this xml-mess. And no, It's not braindead to have playlists with 100 songs or more.
The AFT-Feature would start making sense with DB-playlists. The performance-issuses (still present, although accepable) would be history.
today, therer are two kinds of players out there: db-driven and playlist-driven. The latter are about to become extinct. Amarok is neither the one nor the other.
And the devs already implemented 100+ playlists by default: The smart ones. Or is it also braindead to have more than 100 songs in your collection?
I think, the devs should rethink their concept.

Sorry, this is technically nonsense. In fact database queries were what made some Amarok versions < 1.4.3 slow regarding playlist operations. In 1.4.3 I have removed these queries, and the speedup is about 10x. Keep in mind that simple string operations are a multitude faster than equivalent database queries.

Presently, Amarok will be sufficiently performant with playlist up to ~2000 items. Remaining performance issues could be elminated entirely by making the playlist saving threaded, but I'm not sure I will risk this in the stable branch.

By the way, if you saw our plans for Amarok 2.0 you would probably be shocked The days of giant playlists are over, that's still a relict from XMMS times. Amarok 2 will by default be collection based and only have a small playlist with a couple of tracks in it, however in a much smarter fashion than what we have now. The focus will be shifted from being a playlist-based application to a more information-based (context) approach. (Although we may implement different views, and technically huge playlists won't pose a problem for 2.0).

Mark Kretschmann wrote:Sorry, this is technically nonsense. In fact database queries were what made some Amarok versions < 1.4.3 slow regarding playlist operations. In 1.4.3 I have removed these queries, and the speedup is about 10x. Keep in mind that simple string operations are a multitude faster than equivalent database queries.

Mh, Is this nonsense, then: http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Playlist_redesign ? According to this propopsal, using sql instead of xml for playlist would result in a speedup.

Regarding Amarok2: Does this mean, that I won't have any smart playlists anymore? The most time I listen to a playlist of currently 948 songs, all of which are rated with 5 stars. I don't have any "true" playlist that I hear regularly. I think, this us a convenient way to hear music. I don't have to change the playlist every couple of minutes, and when I skip a song I can be pretty sure that I haven't heard the next song in the last time.

But back to DB versus playlist: I import the ratings from itunes to amarok using winamp (one playlist for each rating). Those m3u-Playlists load terribly slow, despite all tweaks in 1.4.3. But when I rate the items in these playlist  and generate a smart playlist, this playlist loads much much faster. But still slower than in itunes.

However, please implement an m3u-import in amarok2, that I can import the ratings form itunes

Btw, http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/14/itun ... hes/&nbsp;  

stokedfish wrote:Btw, http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/14/itun ... hes/&nbsp;  

iTunes not gathering art is hardly an issue when you have Amarok to do that and there are a million other apps that can do a much better job than iTunes.  The isntallation I played with the other day had none of these problems... it was pretty nice

chodo wrote:

Mark Kretschmann wrote:Sorry, this is technically nonsense. In fact database queries were what made some Amarok versions < 1.4.3 slow regarding playlist operations. In 1.4.3 I have removed these queries, and the speedup is about 10x. Keep in mind that simple string operations are a multitude faster than equivalent database queries.

Mh, Is this nonsense, then: http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Playlist_redesign ? According to this propopsal, using sql instead of xml for playlist would result in a speedup.

That page is ancient. Things have changed, and we've learned much since then.

FYI: Amarok had the cover view in playlist proposed months before iTunes 7 was released...

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126908

Seb Ruiz wrote:FYI: Amarok had the cover view in playlist proposed months before iTunes 7 was released...

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126908

Proposed ... not released.  I understand there are obvious differences between Apple's programming teams and the Amarok developers, so I'm only teasing.  I think it's a really cool idea and would love to see it in Amarok!